The Republican Who Saved Civil Rights

McCulloch and his fellow Republicans insisted that the White House would have to use the full Judiciary Committee to clean up the mess that Celler and the liberals had made of H.R. 7152. The man chosen to deliver that message to the administration was a character every bit as singular as McCulloch or Celler — House Minority Leader Charles Abraham Halleck of Indiana.

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Halleck, a scrapper from Hoosier farm country, had been gleefully battling Democrats since the days of the New Deal. The historian Eric Goldman once described his political views as “just left of King George III.” With his W.C. Fields nose and gravel-voiced Midwestern twang, he was one-half of the Republican congressional leadership, teamed with his Senate counterpart, Everett Dirksen of Illinois, in a weekly news conference of loyal opposition that the New York Times’s Tom Wicker had dubbed “The Ev and Charlie Show,” and that President Kennedy compared to the popular television drama about Prohibition-era gangsters and their tangle with federal agents, "The Untouchables."

Halleck held court in a hideaway office off a basement corridor of the Capitol, presiding over what he called “The Clinic,” his bibulous answer to former Speaker Sam Rayburn’s famous “Board of Education,” the private group of pals and protégés with whom Rayburn shared his opinions and wisdom regarding pending legislative business over Virginia Gentleman bourbon and branch water. In Halleck’s salon, the tipple of choice was Grant’s Standfast Scotch. He was, a friend would recall, a man who “never succumbed to the modernist theory that booze interferes with brain function.” (When Larry O’Brien once told Lyndon B. Johnson that Halleck worried that he might have been a little rough in a telephone call with Johnson because “he had a couple of pops,” Johnson demurred, “No, every time I talk to him, he’s drinking.” “Yeah, well, you catch him after noontime, that’s the way it has to be,” O’Brien replied.)

Now, as the bill arrived in the full Judiciary Committee, it was Halleck who told the Kennedy team that the Republicans would go halfway toward fixing the flawed subcommittee measure, but only halfway. They would also need backing from liberal Northern Democrats. Otherwise, he threatened, the Republicans would oppose any ameliorating amendments, condemning the bill to certain death at the hands of the Southern segregationists on the House floor.

Charles Abraham Halleck, a self-described "gut fighter" from Indiana, was the House Republican leader. He represented almost no black constituents, but in the custom of the day, heeded the wishes of his party's leading expert on civil rights: Bill McCulloch. Halleck risked his own political standing by backing first John Kennedy and then Lyndon Johnson on the civil rights bill.

Like Bill McCulloch, Halleck had hardly any black constituents in his western Indiana district, and he was under assault from correspondents upset that he might support Kennedy’s civil rights program. On June 16, Frank Farr of San Diego demanded, “Would you care to have niggers in your home, marrying into your family, of course you would not. They have only been out of Africa and the trees for a short period of time.” Nonetheless, out of loyalty to McCulloch, Halleck found himself agreeing to help the White House salvage the bill.

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Attorney General Robert Kennedy did his part, telling the Judiciary Committee that “Differences as to approach and emphasis must not be permitted to be escalated into the arena of politics — or else the country will be the loser.” McCulloch and the Kennedy team had agreed to scale back the bill. “What I want is a bill, not an issue,” Robert Kennedy said — just the opposite of the dismissive formulation that his brother had used in deriding the high-minded purism of the liberal groups. Predictably, the civil rights groups hit the ceiling. Clarence Mitchell, the NAACP’s chief Washington lobbyist, called it a “sellout.”

What the liberals saw was compromise and surrender. What they could not appreciate — in part because of the mutual mistrust that had built up — was the Kennedy administration’s hard-headed determination to produce a bill that could pass the House, by any means necessary.

Roland Libonati, a regular in Chicago's Democratic machine, drew the wrath of his political patron, Mayor Richard Daley, by waffling on the bill, after initially promising to help save it. A onetime lawyer for Al Capone, he paid the price for his perfidy when the Daley organization refused to support his reelection.

Manny Celler had agreed to get the ball rolling by amending the bill to limit voting rights provisions to federal elections. To offer this measure he had handpicked Rep. Roland “Libby” Libonati, a stalwart member of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago Democratic machine — and a onetime lawyer for Al Capone — who could usually be counted on to follow the party line. When the full Judiciary Committee met in early October, Libonati made his motion, as arranged. But for procedural reasons, the committee was forced to adjourn before a vote could be taken. That gave the liberals time to block Libonati’s move.

Libonati had his pride and did not want to look like anybody’s stooge, especially if he was one. His resolve was further softened when he happened to catch a television appearance in which Manny Celler, his own pride on the line, continued to insist for public consumption that he would resist efforts to weaken the bill. “I’m watching television and who do I see on the television but my chairman,” Libonati complained. “And he’s telling ’em up there in his district that he’s for a strong bill, and he doesn’t have anything to do with any motion to cut the bill down. So when I hear that, I says to myself, ‘Lib, where are we at here, anyway?’”

RFK making a speech on June 14, 1963. | Warren K. Leffler/Library of Congress

So when the Judiciary Committee reconvened nearly two weeks later, with Libonati’s pending motion as the first order of business, he withdrew it. Complete chaos ensued. At last, Rep. Arch Moore, a pro-civil rights Republican from West Virginia, grew so disgusted by all the maneuvering that he moved to send the strong subcommittee bill to the full House, with a favorable recommendation — the course the administration and Bill McCulloch most feared, because they believed this version of the bill could never pass there, much less survive the Senate. Only the sound of the noon bell — which meant that the full House was in session and, following the custom of the day, committee meetings had to be concluded — spared Celler immediate defeat. The chairman set the committee vote for one week hence, on October 29, but it was President Kennedy himself who would now have to do the toughest fighting.

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The president’s first step was to summon the bipartisan House leadership to a meeting in the Cabinet Room the next day. Halleck had already met with the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee and had gotten an earful of their discontent. “I think it’s only fair to say that this damned thing has gotten all fizzled up and fouled up, into where some of the guys on our side who are normally pretty steady-going, they’ve got themselves all boiled up,” he told the president.